Radsoft
 About | Buy | News | Products | Rants | Search | Security
Home » Resources » Red Hat Diaries

Red Hat Diaries/006a

Blow Your Mind

Back home NeXT only sold two computers, only one with the colour screen. World-wide NeXT sold only 50,000 units in a factory tooled to output 150,000 units a year. But they didn't give up when their hardware business failed: they set about porting NextStep to other processor architectures, including x86.

I was working for a monster government IT training agency at the time, and I got a call from Andreas at the NeXT office. He wanted me to look at NextStep. I'd heard about it and how everyone drooled over it, but I'd never made its acquaintance. Andreas came by with the x86 kit for me: the setup disks, the Objective-C books, even a video. I never installed it, but I read the book voraciously. Andreas wanted me to set up a permanent exhibit at our company - a corner somewhere, nicely highlighted, something to let people know that NextStep was out there.

Andreas and NextStep were at the Unix expo that year. Agneta loved going to those things because there was always so much free candy and other stuff. By the time I'd seen Andreas and NextStep there she was loaded down with an armful of purple Sun bags and stuff like that and munching away from a monster bag of jelly babies and mints.

'This is the stuff I've been telling you about,' I told her. She was already somewhere else in her mind. 'Hey Andreas, show her how good this stuff is.'

'But I don't understand any of that stuff,' she protested.

'No matter,' I said. 'You do understand time, don't you? You understand how long I slave away over applications, right?'

She nodded in agreement. 'Andreas, let's build her an application. Agneta, remember that 411 job I got? Remember how long that took for only the first prototype? Watch this. Just try to pay attention for a minute or two, ok? Andreas, let's build her a black book phone app for phone numbers for all her boyfriends.' Agneta didn't react.

Andreas fired up Project Builder and Interface Builder by clicking on icons and stuff. He didn't use the keyboard. Once in Interface Builder he was looking at the coming application window, and again using the mouse, he dragged something off a palette and suddenly there was a small entry field on the window. Then using the keyboard for the first and only time, he dragged with the mouse, holding down some shift key on the keyboard, and the one entry field expanded into a nice matrix. They were all squared away and in neat rows and columns. Leaving the keyboard completely, he dragged a couple of buttons onto the window, then turned to me.

'Maybe we should have input validation,' he said. 'You know, a phone number is supposed to be digits and nothing else. We could make sure the field is completely numeric.'

'Sounds like a good idea,' I said, and Andreas now drags something in from another window on screen and drops it on the phone number field. 'Done,' he says, jiggles a bit more with the mouse and the windows, then clicks something on the Project Builder menu, there's a bit of a whirl, and then he says 'Ok, ready to go!'

All this has taken perhaps three minutes.

'Ok, Agneta, your turn,' I say. 'Step up and try it. It's finished.'

Agneta steps up cautiously, but doesn't quite know what to do. 'It's a phone book app,' I say. 'Just put a name or two in there, with some phone numbers. Start with your own name and phone number. Put in mine.'

So she does it, struggling with the keyboard as always. She gets two names and phone numbers in. This takes longer than it did to build the application. 'Ok, now save it,' Andreas says. 'Up there, on the menu - name and save the file.'

Agneta actually finds the menu option and gives the file a name and saves it. 'Thanks Andreas!' I say, turning to Agneta, putting an arm around her. 'Now wasn't that fast, honey?' She nods almost excitedly.

'Yeah, that was fast. This is called NextStep?'

I look sarcastically at the corporate logo hanging over her head. She follows my eyes and looks up too. 'Oh,' she says sheepishly. 'Thanks again Andreas,' I say, and we wander off.

People just don't get it when it comes to NextStep. Some people liked Be. I've never run Be, so I cannot say. A lot of people like Unix - or penguin Unix to be more exact. Down in Dante's Inferno the Microsoft Zombies weep and gnash their teeth and say things like 'we've got 95% of the market'. No one seems to get it.

Not only is NextStep incredibly beautiful, incomparably futuristic, it's also the most amazing development environment ever. Andreas used a single keyboard key to build Agneta's phone book app - a shift key, to expand the entry field into a matrix of them; otherwise he didn't touch the keyboard - he just clicked and dragged.

I remember I asked Andreas how big that phone book sucker was on disk, and I remember he told me, and I don't remember the exact figure, but it definitely wasn't much. Today NextStep is going to have a slight overhead because it runs on a RISC processor, but this is not that painful at all. You get really stabile apps in a matter of minutes instead of days and weeks. You keep a smile on your face. You don't get worn out from lack of sleep and everyone around you complaining and doing the Microsoft thing or the Linux thing. As Apple likes to say, 'it just works.'

Andrew Stone of Albuquerque has been building NextStep apps since 1989. He was a Mac freak already by 1986, but when someone showed him what NextStep could do, he was gone - and hooked on NextStep for life. Today, with NextStep running on Apple hardware, it must be like a homecoming for him.

Andrew has a tutorial online. (The link is coming up, so don't worry.) The tutorial shows how you can make a fully-featured word processor in 20 (twenty minutes) with NextStep. And believe me, about 19 of these 20 minutes are spent trying to use NextStep for the first time, because the tutorial assumes you know NOTHING. It takes time to show you how to open programs, how to find things on the menus, the works. There is only one piece of code you have to put in there. Even a complete idiot can copy out that code, either by copy and paste, or by simply typing it in, it's that trivial, it's that easy.

No matter who you are, you deserve to give yourself the chance to see this little tour de force for NextStep. You don't have to be a developer. If you have the Developer CD, just install what's on there if you haven't done so already. Then follow Andrew's online instructions.

But be forewarned: NextStep can blow your mind. It has that kind of reputation.

Have fun. Now here is the link. Here.

Click here »

About | Buy | News | Products | Rants | Search | Security
Copyright © Radsoft. All rights reserved.